Will Padres TV impasse drag on?

Richard and Karen Stern of Scripps Ranch show their support at the July "Padres To The People" rally to end an impasse that blacked out games across a wide swath of the county's TV market.
— Howard Lipin

Richard and Karen Stern of Scripps Ranch show their support at the July "Padres To The People" rally to end an impasse that blacked out games across a wide swath of the county's TV market.
— Howard Lipin

The hollow, hackneyed phrase “die-hard Padres fan” took on new meaning and new gravity with the death of Richard Wexler.

After seeing every Padres game since his move to San Diego in the World Series season of 1998, Wexler was thrown a curve in the ninth inning of his life: He couldn’t catch his team in person or watch it on TV.

Imagine how that buckled the former semipro ballplayer’s knees at age 103.

Wexler died Jan. 7, eight days before Padres co-owner Ron Fowler said the team would finally intervene in an impasse that left 42 percent of the county’s pay-TV customers with dark screens during 2012 games.

The phrase “about time” only applies to those of us who have it.

With Opening Day around a hot corner, attention is shifting to the two remaining holdouts who won’t play ball with Fox Sports San Diego — Dish TV and Time Warner Cable. Speculation is that Dish, the county’s smallest TV provider, will show games this season, but Time Warner, the county’s second-biggest, may not. By one estimate, Time Warner serves about 22 percent — or 185,000 — of the county’s pay-TV subscribers.

If you’re looking to lampoon San Diego’s status as a minor-league sports town, 22 is hardly much better than 42. It’s a void.

Maybe a deal gets done and we’ll all be complaining about catcher Yasmani Grandal’s 50-game steroids suspension when the season starts April 1. Maybe not.

Nancy Grobe, Wexler’s daughter, said this: “I hope that Time Warner, in tribute to him, will broadcast the Padres games this season. It was a great sadness for him to miss all of last year’s games. Shame on them.”

She and I struck up a conversation in August, much the way I’m hoping Padres and Time Warner executives conduct their talks: fruitfully.

“You can only imagine how sad he is,” Grobe emailed me on Aug. 9, more than midway through last season. “It has really impacted the quality of his life.”

“Thank you for having so much heart,” she wrote as the season ended but my push to televise games didn’t. “I can only hope that my 103-year-old dad will still be with us and will have the Pads’ Opening Day to watch on TV.”

Similar frustration has spread. Some fans have dropped season tickets while others have switched TV providers. Many have lost patience with, and fervor for, a team that owns a 20 percent stake in Fox Sports San Diego and should have ushered in a deal a year ago.

Lock the executives in a room, one said. Encourage an exodus from Time Warner, another said. Fox Sports is demanding too much, a third told me.

“I am as disgusted as other fans that absolutely nothing has progressed in the past 12 months,” said Tierrasanta resident Jim Norr, 64. “My 6-year-old grandson, Nixon, and five of his pals could have agreed on something in far less time than has transpired to date.”

Hear that? First-graders are better at jobs they don’t have than Fox Sports and Time Warner executives are at theirs.